Abstract

Understanding the nature and dimensions of the world food problem and the policies available to alleviate it has been the focal point of IIASA's Food and Agriculture Program (FAP) since it began in 1977.

National food systems are highly interdependent, and yet the major policy options exist at the national level. Therefore, to explore these options, it is necessary both to develop policy models for national economies and to link them together by trade and capital transfers. Over the years FAP has, with the help of a network of collaborating institutions, developed and linked national policy models of twenty countries, which together account for nearly 80 percent of important agricultural attributes such as area, production, population, exports, imports and so on. The remaining countries are represented by 14 somewhat simpler models of groups of countries.

The European Community (EC) is a major actor on the world market. An aggregate food and agriculture model of the EC, in which the EC is treated as one nation has been developed by the FAP, as part of the IIASA/FAP basic linked system.

In addition, development of a detailed model of the EC, in which the member nations of the EC are represented by separate models which interact among themselves within the framework of the common agricultural policy (CAP) of the EC, was initiated in 1978. This was begun in collaboration with the University of Goettingen, which received a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation. The work on model development was transferred to IIASA in 1982, where it continued until the end of 1984, under a grant from the Centre for World Food Studies (CWFS) of the Netherlands.

In this paper, which is one of a series of papers reporting the work on the development of the detailed EC model, Erik Geyskens describes the exchange component of the model.